Responsible Innovation in Geoengineering

I’ve just published a paper in the journal of Science and Engineering Ethics which gives a summary of one of the ideas in the book – technology as a social experiment – and develops it to discuss how we might think about the politics of conducting experiments in controversial areas of science. The paper began life at a fascinating conference hosted by a Ibo van de Poel, a philosopher in Delft running a large project looking at a range of technologies-as-experiments.

Abstract

Geoengineering is defined as the ‘deliberate and large-scale intervention in the Earth’s climatic system with the aim of reducing global warming’. The technological proposals for doing this are highly speculative. Research is at an early stage, but there is a strong consensus that technologies would, if realisable, have profound and surprising ramifications. Geoengineering would seem to be an archetype of technology as social experiment, blurring lines that separate research from deployment and scientific knowledge from technological artefacts. Looking into the experimental systems of geoengineering, we can see the negotiation of what is known and unknown. The paper argues that, in renegotiating such systems, we can approach a new mode of governance—collective experimentation. This has important ramifications not just for how we imagine future geoengineering technologies, but also for how we govern geoengineering experiments currently under discussion.